


your shadow dogging me

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Batman Needs a Robin, Canonical Character Death, Coping, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hair Gel, Tim Is Helping, and under a thousand words counts, but bruce wayne needs his family, i was challenged to write this as a mini-prompt, obviously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 18:40:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18666124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: For the prompt: "Bruce adapting to the presence of Timothy Drake in the wake of his son's death."





	your shadow dogging me

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposted from tumblr.

The hell of it was, Tim looked the part.

That had helped him sell himself as Robin—the illusion of continuity to the vast majority of the public who never got the chance to look too close and notice the many differences between one black-haired boy-child and another was a bonus—but it made things harder for Bruce, personally.

It had been _months_. Most of a year, by the time Tim came back from the training trip that had apparently gone utterly off the rails and gotten him mixed up with various supervillains ahead of schedule, which did not portend well for his ability to keep out of trouble, and started being around all the time.

Between his and Alfred's tactical alterations and Tim’s strong personal style preference the uniform didn’t even look terribly similar, and in the field that helped.

But around the Cave, during training sessions, or when Bruce was working and Tim was practicing and his guard was down…he kept…

Not forgetting. He wasn’t disrespecting Jason’s memory that badly. He _wasn’t._ But it was as though somewhere in his head was a particularly stupid dog that was still patiently waiting for its person to come home, and every time it caught that brief, dark-haired figure in the corner of its eye it said, ‘ _aha! there you are!’_

There you are, Jay lad.

He woke from a dream with those words on his lips—an ordinary, peaceful dream, not one of the nightmares, a dream of puttering around the Cave running test assays on some of the more finicky equipment, and looking up, and seeing Jason had come in, and being glad to see him. He cried himself back to sleep the way he had as a child, and woke up to find Alfred had canceled all his morning commitments and let him stay in bed until eleven.

Tim was smaller than Jason had been when he died, which helped not at all, because Jason had been that small _once._ In the best days, just after he’d really settled in.

And frankly Bruce hadn’t adapted to the adolescent growth spurt that had been in its early stages, before he’d run out of opportunity to adapt to anything new about Jason, ever again.

Tim was almost nothing like Jason, except for all the ways he was, and Bruce seized rather desperately on the first set of qualities. It was becoming a matter of some urgency that he drive into his subconscious the very real physical existence of Tim Drake as his own independent individual. He was in danger of picking up a tic of flinching whenever he caught his Robin in the corner of his eye, and instinctively anticipated the emotional crash of thinking Jason was there and realizing he really, really wasn’t.

A few days after he noticed the nascent bad habit in himself, Tim appeared on patrol with his hair gelled up into a positive forest of spikes.

“Robin, what on earth…”

Tim shrugged. “It’s cool. We want Robin to be cool, right? Younger kids look up to me.”

He struck a pose, and if he hadn’t been avoiding Batman’s eyes Bruce probably would have accepted without further consideration that this latest choice to modify Robin's image was just another teenage fad making itself felt in his life. Tim had an ordinary life outside his world, after all, and he did care about ordinary things.

But he did avoid Batman’s eyes, and Bruce did consider it further, because he didn’t know this boy all that well yet but he did have some experience with teenagers, and with people determined to look after him.

And with teenagers determined to look after him, for that matter; Dick had been casual about it and focused mostly on cheering him up, but Jason had been like a badger when he got it into his head that Bruce was in a bad way and needed to be cared for. Alfred had only encouraged him.

They never talked about it. But the spikes stayed, for a long time, even after they’d stopped being fashionable.

**Author's Note:**

> original tags included:
> 
> #i know this isn't a _precisely_ accurate chronology of how Tim's robinhood went down #don't care #that was in another century #and besides that world is dead #i like the spikes though #let us acknowledge 90s Robin #and his hair gel of secret identity
> 
> Though not infrequently he kept it up as Tim, too. I think the artists just liked how much more lazily they could orient his head in space with his hair standing up. 😆


End file.
